A Conversation With Heather Graham on the Habits of a Prolific Writer (Killer Writers)

Author Heather Graham has always amazed me. Not only her consistently high-quality books, the number of books and short stories she has written, but also her compassion and devotion to other writers. It was a pleasure catching up with Heather when she was in New York City during one of her busy tour schedules.

(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

“Heather, starting this interview because I can’t keep up, how many books have you written? Every time I check, the number keeps going up!”

“I honestly don’t know because there’s a difference between short stories—we’ve all done a million short stories—and then novellas, books, and everything. But I do think the actual novels are around two hundred. I will have my 150th with Mirror/Harlequin/HarperCollins in April.”

I laugh. “You think you’re qualified to talk about being a prolific writer?”

“Honestly, I have five children. That helps make you prolific. They’re grown up now, but we probably discussed this before. I was doing dinner theater in South Florida, but we weren’t Equity. I was bartending to supplement my ability to do theater. And then by the time we had three children, it’s just like, ‘I can’t be gone this long. I can’t be gone all the time.’ One, it could be more expensive going to work. Two, I didn’t want to have children and not be there.”

“I understand. I hung up my hat after my son was born. It just seemed more important to me to be a dad than it was to be traveling away from home and my wife so much. And now that I had a child – one of my bucket list dreams – I couldn’t stand the thought of missing even a moment of him growing up. I’m career-driven, but I also believe it’s more important to have balance.”

“I was one of those people who was career-driven, as well. I wasn’t going to get married until I was in my 30s. I certainly wouldn’t have children until then. I got married at eighteen. What is that expression? We make plans, and God laughs or something like that. But it’s fun that this conversation is for Writer’s Digest because that’s how I first got published. I bought Writer’s Digest’s Writer’s Market, studied everything in it and started sending off. If I’m talking to Charlaine Harris, she likes to say that we came from the age of dinosaurs: Self-addressed, stamped, return envelopes. Years and years and years ago, we had a writers’ group in South Florida, and it was funny because we would get excited if the mimeographed rejections had someone’s real signature on them that someone had actually read the book and was looking forward to other things, so publishing has certainly changed drastically.”

“It certainly has. I remember those days, as well. So, how many books do you write per year?”

“It depends. I have been writing one hardcover, three paperbacks, and then Liz Berry and MJ Rose—and I think somebody else is involved with it now—have a company called 1001 Dark Nights, and I adore Liz, so I do a novella for 1001 Dark Nights Review.”

“Five major projects per year, and then short stories, and anything else on top of that.”

“But I think I’m incredibly lucky. I love what I do. As you said earlier, life will always throw something at us for inspiration.”

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“Heather, how do you manage your writing time and balance it with all the other responsibilities to maintain your output of these five major projects per year? You’re on tour. Other writers are working full-time jobs. Both take up time. How do you juggle it?”

“I tend to like writing in the daytime, and I think that’s because I have five children, and the oldest is 13 years older than the youngest. For years and years and years of my life, you got everybody up, got everybody to school, and when the kids went off to work, I would go to work myself. I still like daytime, but the kids like to joke that I became a Dr. Seuss novel. I can write on a train, on a plane, in a car, going far. I mean, I love conferences. I think they’re wonderful. I love people. I love the networking that goes on, but sometimes I think new writers need to remember everyone’s journey is different. When you go to workshops, you must take what works for you. A lot of people have full-time day jobs. Many people may also have one to five or even more children. You must balance living with what you’re doing. Say you can only work on Sunday mornings. Then you work on Sunday mornings. You must be dedicated and loyal to the path that you’ve given yourself. Not to say you couldn’t have a gas leak on a Sunday morning, but it’s like riding a bike. You get back on the next week.”

“I was going to talk about how you stay motivated and inspired, but you’ve answered that: you need to buy socks for the grandkids and kids, and then you also love what you do.”

“I’m one of the people with Scottish and Irish parents, and they came with a truckload of books. They said I always had my nose in a book from when I was little. I still love books, but I think my passion is history, and then, when you meet interesting people. I love characters, and I love history. History will always give us something, so not that you must write a historical, but you can always draw on history.”

“You obviously don’t have a problem, but a lot of people I work with talk about their creative blocks and their writer’s block. I don’t know that I’ve ever had writer’s block, and I would venture that you have not either. But do you have any thoughts on writer’s block for people reading this and feeling they are experiencing it?”

“I have to say I’m with you. I don’t think I’ve ever had it. There’s always been something. Even if you’re thinking about where you’re going with one project, there might be something in your mind that makes you want to start another, so go ahead and jot those notes down. I usually end up doing something with them later. Now, of course, I’m lucky I get to travel a lot. But I still go up to the museums near me. We have a wonderful Seminole museum in the Everglades, and just a little drive through the Everglades can get you going on many ideas. That may not necessarily be the thing for anybody else, but do something you enjoy, letting your mind open up and see what’s happening. That would be my suggestion.”

“When writing your five books per year, do you have some sort of schedule or planning that you do to make sure you accomplish all the things you need to accomplish, as we say in film, ‘on time and on budget.’ Do you have some planning device or something that you use?”

“I think my biggest problem is going down the rabbit hole. I love research, and I’ll always get going on something else. And then you find out the most bizarre things. I’ve been to Salem a lot. My husband’s dad was one of eleven. His mother was one of six, and between them, they have dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles in Massachusetts, so we would go up and visit them. We would spend a lot of time in Salem, and I loved Salem. I loved the history of it. I loved how several of the Founding Fathers looked at what had happened in Salem when writing the Constitution. But this time, when I was researching some of what had gone on, it was interesting because I found Walt Disney was the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great-grandson of George Burrows, who was hanged as a witch. You find all kinds of fascinating things when you go down the rabbit hole. I’m not quite sure how you’d use it.”

“But you’ve tucked it away.”

“It’s tucked away! In the last trio that I did, I had placed a fictional FBI crew in Europe, and the crew is based on FBI agents who go through the Academy. They’re real agents, but they are among the 0.1% of people who can speak to the dead if they choose to speak. This one is taking place in Europe, and they are looking for someone who is killing people as if they were vampires. I wound up researching Stoker and everything that went before him and Madam Bathory, and you wind up fascinated by everything that went on and history’s perceptions as told by different people about what went on. I find all that fascinating. You stash away the little things you find to use some time.”

“I assume you write all the time, but some people I find are obsessed with word count for the day. How much do you write a day? Do you have any advice for people trying to get some structure in their life? What is considered normal? What do you say about word counts and time spent?”

“Well, for one thing, if you think about word count, if you wrote a thousand words a day, in a year, you’d have 365,000 words, and then, of course, you could minus weekends. You could do all things like that. I tend to think more of Monday through Friday. And then again, because of so many children, I tend to think from seven-thirty/eight a.m. to late afternoon. But it’s funny. I took a train to World Fantasy and recently took a train to Toronto for their anniversary. And I love riding on a train. There’s just the motion and freedom of being where you are, so I don’t have a set schedule. If I were to say if I had one, I would say eight a.m. to three or four. But not necessarily. If I need to, I’ll write at midnight.”

“I asked my friend Jeffrey Deaver, ‘When do you write?’ He’s like, ‘When nobody’s talking to me.’ So, it’s like he’s writing on a plane. Wherever he must be. I have the impression you’re very similar to that. When you’re writing and trying to get things out, how do you juggle the writing and the editing so that both get done and one doesn’t overshadow the other because both tasks are important to the finished work?”

“When I get my editorial notes, I go through them, but when I’m finished with something, I look at it. Then I have a friend who was an English teacher for 33 years, so I will also ask her to read it to help me find out what I’ve done. She’s incredible because she’ll also make a Bible for me, so I can always go back and look at names. Having somebody who does that type of thing with you is amazing. I love editorial notes because an editor will see something I didn’t think of. We’re always looking for both of us to create the best possible project.”

“Most writers have a ton of ideas. How do you prioritize which ones you want to write, or is it in your best interest to write when you have multiple ideas simultaneously?”

“Whichever one is forcing its way out. There’s always something that’s more blinding. I know that with one, I was thinking about doing something else. But you know there’s the other joke that five children finally paid off because of the many things their friends now do. One is a Miami-Dade homicide cop, a U.S. Marshal, and things like that, and I’m not sure if they don’t groan when they see me coming. But they’re all wonderful. They help a lot, but I think my favorite is my son has a friend who became a fabricator, so she works in Hollywood, where she started with the Stan Winston studio. She works for Legacy now, but she took us for a trip through the studios one night, and of course, the lights were all low. It’s night, and you walk in. There was the creepiest vampire I’ve ever seen, and I think I would be afraid if I were alone there at night, and then she started laughing because the next thing you see is the Geico pic. What a fascinating thing to do for a living. And then she was also funny because she dresses Robert Downey, Jr., as Iron Man, and she says it’s not an easy job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

“We get to do so many fun things in our profession. My son watched Sesame Street, and I was doing a project with Jim Henson Studios, and I got to go to the place where they make all the Muppets. My son got to control the animatronics on many of the characters. I can’t remember the movie they were working on then, but they had this big dragon and stuff. It’s just amazing to go behind the scenes.”

“I’m so jealous. I think he was one of the most creative, wonderful human beings. Such a loss.”

“As writers, we get to do so many wonderful things. But let’s go back behind the scenes with you. What habits or mindsets are crucial for a writer to maintain productivity and consistency?”

“I’ve seen this a couple of times: ‘Attach butt to chair and work.’ If you want it, you have to do it. You must make yourself sit down. There was another thing, Nora Roberts said: ‘I can fix a bad page. A blank page is still a blank page.’ You need to sit down and get something down. That is one thing I do. Especially when I pick up the next day, I always look over what was done the day before to ensure I’m following consistency and see if there’s anything I want to change. But once you’ve done that, suddenly you find that you are working, and then you’ll keep going. It’s more the idea of just sitting down and doing it, then following through. I have a couple of friends lately who have been bugging me because I’ve read their work, and it’s actually really good, but they haven’t sent it anywhere. You must make sure that you sit down and do the work. Something else today is that I think Amazon is wonderful. Through the years, I’ve read things I was in love with, and then people would send them off, and they wouldn’t know how to market them, so they weren’t picked up. Now, because of Amazon, these things can go out there. The detriment is that you’ve got to remember the word ‘publish.’ You’re putting something out there. Please make sure it’s edited. Copy edited. Yes, there can be mistakes in anything, but you don’t want five on a page. You want to make sure you put your best foot forward and have the consistency and the discipline to sit down and do it and follow through. Get your work done. Make sure you’ve edited. Either send it off to a traditional or small press publisher, or publish it yourself, and then do it.”

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Heather Graham is the NYT and USA Today bestselling author of over two hundred novels, including suspense, paranormal, historical, and mainstream Christmas fare. She is also the CEO of Slush Pile Productions, a recording company and production house for various charity events. Look her up at http://www.theoriginalheathergraham.com/.